Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters

Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes." Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.

Oh, AGAIN?

[Rogerborg]

For those not in the know, this is how the conversation goes.

• Developer: We need to design-in anti-cheat methods from the get-go, or honest players will get raped.
• Producer: And that'll delay my demo, right? Where's my demo? Show me a demo. Demo-demo-demo.
• Developer: But it'll save us time in the long run, and we won't have to play whack-a-hacker catch up after release, with all the costs and bad press...
• Producer: Yeah... but I'm only producing it up to release. And are you going to be relegated to the support crew, or am I going to take you with me to my next exciting project?
• Developer: Uh... I'll get on with the demo.

That's the best case scenario. A depressing number of devs don't even consider trying to design-out hacks, and think that whack-a-hack is a winning long term strategy, despite the decades of evidence that say it ain't so. I'm looking at you Blizzard.

Re:VAC

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the PC version sold very well. See http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=104549 [bluesnews.com]

Lots of people are clueless, yes

Re:Barely a start

[shutdown -p now]

Got to say this is so to the point.

Many time I've made some good clean kills followed by a lot of "OMFG nice wall hack/Aim bot/cheating...." and I'm not even that good.
There are far more competent player out there make far more constant kills than me and its not cheating, Its just good reflexes and hard work.

It's even funnier in Left 4 Dead.

For one thing, most Infected there produce a very distinct sound, and with a little bit of training, one can aim at sound alone and shoot through walls, hitting more often than not. With more experience you can hear that sound from quite far away.

Then there are bugs in the game engine which result in shadows "bleeding through" walls or roof at some spots, and occasionally even chunk of the model - again, leading to wall shots.

Finally, after playing for a long time, you learn the maps really well, and that includes all the typical ambush spots. At that point quite often you start shooting before turning around the corner, so that if a Boomer is there (probability 30%), he dies before he has any chance of barfing on you.

In all of the above scenarios, if you're the one doing the shooting, you'll get "OMG! wallhax/aimbot!" whines more often than not, especially when the other team is relatively unexperienced (or is being pwnd). I've been vote-kicked off servers several times because of that.